Oatmeal for a dollar! Print out your coupon and go get some delicious oatmeal at Jamba Juice right now!

The James Beard Awards are announced! Check out the full list. Anyone else a little disappointed by the food blogger nominees? They’re One Block Diet, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and BA Foodist. There are so many more innovative and more entertaining blogs out there by highly qualified people!

The Bread Art Project wants you to make your own bread art! The best part? For every piece you create, $1 gets donated to Feeding America.

Just when you thought people might start eating healthier, America proves us wrong once again. Although if you want one meal for two days this will do the trick. And if you can finish this monstrosity, you get a free t-shirt. That is, if you can still fit into it…

There are a lot of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, but when did using “eco-friendly ice cubes” become one of them?! Useful overseas where water isn’t clean, but in America? How far are people going to go with this stuff?

I love coffee. I love ice cream. This is heaven! Starbucks has teamed up with Unilever instead of the massively inferior Dreyer’s. Unilever is the maker of both Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers. B&J’s will always be number one on my list, and Breyer’s still destroys Dreyer’s in any match-up. I’m already searching for where I can find these cartons of delight, not to mention ice cream bars!

In Chicago, the cops are called when a special at El Pollo Loco caused a complete mob of people looking for some low-priced chicken. I guess people were taking the name El Pollo Loco (The Crazy Chicken) a little too literally!

For anyone who’s ever had Jacques Torres super-thick, super-incredible Hot Chocolate or his highly addictive chocolate chip cookies, something may be on the books for you: Jacques Torres ice cream! The Huffington Post revealed that he is now considering opening an ice cream shop complete with seating next door to his first chocolate store in Brooklyn. Furthermore, we might have an ice cream truck on the books! I don’t even want to think how long the line would be for that truck if it started trolling the streets of Manhattan. If it does, though, expect to see me there. I have in fact been known to wait almost two hours in line for Garrett’s Popcorn in Chicago when the irresistible urge hits me. Currently he sells ice cream sandwiches during the summer (which I’ve never had, but I’ve heard amazing things), but the new store would be selling “ice cream with chocolate and passion fruit, raspberry, peanut butter, banana”. Sounds delicious! There’s nothing like going out for good homemade ice cream.

I am now officially on a hunt to find the best tasting chocolate ice cream out there that won’t make me gain 20 pounds in a single sitting. So logically, I go into the grocery store and pick up a carton of what seems to be the most extreme and delicious flavor I can below 200 calories per serving: Edy’s Loaded Chocolate Fudge Brownie (for those of you in a different part of the country, Edy’s is also known as Dreyer’s). The carton design is so crazy I could barely even wait to go home and give it a taste (I mean seriously, it makes you think that brownies will actually be exploding out of the ice cream).

Needless to say, the best part about this ice cream was the carton. I was surprised, considering the fact that I had heard some rather exuberant reviews of it from friends. However, the ice cream failed to live up to expectations. Despite the low calorie content (120 per 1/2 cup), I would’ve felt better about splurging and digging into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. While there was both a decent chocolate taste and an abundance of brownie pieces in the Loaded ice cream, I had a serious issue with the texture in every component. To best describe it, the ice cream simply seemed “off” to me. An inspection of the carton revealed why: this isn’t actually ice cream! Edy’s has labelled it a “frozen dairy dessert”, which may explain why it lacks the rich, dense creaminess that I expect when eating ice cream. The only creaminess it does have seems artificial and airy, not to mention that the stuff didn’t even seem frozen. It had been sitting in my freezer for quite some time, and the travel time between the grocery store and my house is about 5 minutes, yet the ice cream was way too easy to scoop to be real. I even dug way down in the carton thinking maybe the layer on top had melted a bit. It made no difference; essentially it was more like a glorified mousse. Likewise, the brownie pieces were less than stellar, not to mention too small. It was as if the brownies were overcooked before being mixed in, making them way to hard and chewy (but not in a good way). In the end, this is not an ice cream I will be buying again. When I want ice cream, I want real ice cream. I don’t want some sad imitation glop that in no way satisfies my need to sit down with the carton armed only with a spoon. Bad form, Edy’s. Next time get it right.